Hard work wasted on Kate Soper’s pretentious “Ipsa Dixit”

By Greggory Moore

No-one needs to sell me on either Kate Soper’s or Long Beach Opera’s ability to do great work. Long Beach Opera’s world premiere of Soper’s The Romance of the Rose last year may be the best opera I’ve ever seen — and probably my fave. 

So it was with trepidation that I perused the insert Long Beach Opera shoved into the program accompanying their staging of Soper’s Pulitzer-nominated Ipsa Dixit at the Art Theatre. Titled “An Analysis of Observing Ipsa Dixit,” what followed was a series of needless dicta: “Arrive with time to ponder, exit with time to reflect.” “The show’s essence lies with its auditory presentation.” “The show’s visual elements are crucial to its artistic impact.” Etc.

Most concerning was the concluding pronouncement: “An understanding of this analysis and interpretation of tacitly implied guidance will ensure deep and profound engagement.” In other words: If you don’t think it’s brilliant, you don’t get it. Why the need for a preemptive strike against the possibility of feeling it ain’t all that? Can’t Ipsa Dixit speak for itself?

Shortly into what came to seem like an interminable 90 minutes, I understood: director James Darrah and company feared we might regard Ipsa Dixit as an exemplar of pretentiousness — with good reason.

Let me state right here that the performance of Ipsa Dixit was first-rate. Soprano Anna Schubert delivered a tour de force in a role whose difficulty lies even more in the precise, often rapid-fire diction and an ever-shifting array of vocal sounds than in the bursts and flurries of musical notes that regularly come out of nowhere. And because Soper often doubles voice and instrument, much of what sounds random simply cannot be. For this to come off, the musical performance must be every bit as dialed in as the vocalization, and the trio of Mona Tian (violin), Sidney Hopson (percussion), and especially Rachel Beetz (flutes) are equal to the task. 

Soper says it took six years to compose and pull together all of Ipsa Dixit’s elements, and surely a large chunk of that time was spent concretizing what we might call a sort of stochastic expressionism. But to me it was a tremendous waste of time. I’ve got no taste for “music” (scare quotes because Ipsa Dixit leans more in the direction of sound-/performance-art than opera (even “modern” opera, e.g. The Romance of the Rose)) that tortures single notes ad nauseam, that falls back and back and back into the same unconventional conventions, that meanders without ever looking for a home.

What turns this unmusical purgatory into total abstrutrocity is Soper’s libretto, a hodgepodge of thoughts on art, character, genre, language, meaning, expression, etc. The lion’s share comes from Aristotle’s Poetics. Have you read it? Not exactly poetry, let me tell ya — and here it’s pedantically served up on a bed of often screechy atonality and much musical ado about nothing. The words/thoughts of several others are included (Plato, Freud…was my beloved Wittgenstein really dragged into this?!), though for some reason Darrah chose to withhold the titles of Ipsa Dixit’s six movements, which include as subtitles the names of the thinkers Soper expropriates.

What Darrah did provide, using the Art Theatre screen as a backdrop, is selected scenes from Carl Dreyer’s 1928 classic The Passion of Joan of Arc. These are sometimes repeated, cropped, sped up, etc., always partly obscured by horizontal blue lines that are there because, well, just because. There was also a movement element capably performed by a pair of dancers from the Martha Graham Dance Company that seemed a bit tacked on even before the dancers retreated to the lobby for a costume change and made their way back down the aisles in sparkly evening gowns, munching on popcorn as they took seats among the audience.

An hour deep into Ipsa Dixit my companion — a former professional opera singer, head of a university opera program, and professor emeritus who has a far greater appreciation of opera, the stochastic, and abstract expressionism than I do (he’s the vocalist on a recording of Pierrot lunaire, for fuck’s sake) — snatched my notebook, scribbled “DIE JOAN DIE!!!”, and thrust it back onto my lap, explaining later that he couldn’t stop hoping to see Mlle. de Arc being burned at the stake, as that would likely signal Ipsa Dixit was nearing its conclusion. Ipse dixit.

“Whatever I’m trying to say [with Ipsa Dixit] is not actually in the text or in the music,” Soper says in a 2018 interview. That’s a telling — and I think damning — admission by the creator of any work of art, never mind one whose final line is “People can understand you when you say something.” No doubt she’s having a bit of fun there (ponderous as it is, Ipsa Dixit is clearly intended to be playful). But when you go round and round for an hour-and-a-half with musings on meaning and language while knowing full well that you haven’t said what you’re trying to say, clearly there’s no there there.

That is, unless all you care about is the artistic expression standing as pure phenomenon, i.e., outside the bounds of signification. As god in the universe of her creation (as all artists are), Soper isn’t obliged even to be substantive or coherent, let alone entertaining or worthwhile to little ol’ me. 

But I, for one, want more — or at least other (no, I’ll stick with “more”) — from art. So although The New Yorker labels Ipsa Dixit a “comprehensively astounding […] twenty-first-century masterpiece” and the New York Times declares it a “heady mixture [that] isn’t in the least pretentious or ponderous, but rather sweet, searching and deeply intelligent,” caveat emptor when it comes to the hype.